ous past I have
shown our contemporaries the full extent of their duty towards the
country. In fact, it is for nations especially to bear in remembrance
the ancient adage: _noblesse oblige_!

FOOTNOTES:

[22] The author here refers to the series of biographies contained in
tome III. of the _Notices Biographiques_.--_Translator_.

[23] These celebrated laws, known in astronomy as the laws of Kepler,
are three in number. The first law is, that the planets describe
ellipses around the sun in their common focus; the second, that a line
joining the planet and the sun sweeps over equal areas in equal times;
the third, that the squares of the periodic times of the planets are
proportional to the cubes of their mean distances from the sun. The
first two laws were discovered by Kepler in the course of a laborious
examination of the theory of the planet Mars; a full account of this
inquiry is contained in his famous work _De Stella Martis_, published in
1609. The discovery of the third law was not effected until, several
years afterwards, Kepler announced it to the world in his treatise on
Harmonics (1628). The passage quoted below is extracted from that
work.--_Translator_.

[24] The spheroidal figure of the earth was established by the
comparison of an arc of the meridian that had been measured in France,
with a similar arc measured in Lapland, from which it appeared that the
length of a degree of the meridian increases from the equator towards
the poles, conformably to what ought to result upon the supposition of
the earth having the figure of an oblate spheroid. The length of the
Lapland arc was determined by means of an expedition which the French
Government had despatched to the North of Europe for that purpose. A
similar expedition had been despatched from France about the same time
to Peru in South America, for the purpose of measuring an arc of the
meridian under the equator, but the results had not been ascertained at
the time to which the author alludes in the text. The variation of
gravity at the surface of the earth was established by Richer's
experiments with the pendulum at Cayenne, in South America (1673-4),
from which it appeared that the pendulum oscillates more slowly--and
consequently the force of gravity is less intense--under the equator
than in the latitude of Paris.--_Translator_.

[25] It may perhaps be asked why we place Lagrange among the French
geometers? This is our reply: It appears to us that